You really want to know what it’s like being a Certified Nursing Assistant in long-term care or rehab today? It’s not the calm, compassionate environment the brochures portray. It’s organized chaos — held together by exhausted, underpaid caregivers doing their best to protect residents in a system that’s collapsing from neglect and mismanagement.
Every shift, we face the impossible. Cognitively aware residents scream for help with no way to calm them. Dementia and behavioral patients wander and fall. Hospice patients — who deserve peace, dignity, and specialized care — are left suffering in facilities unequipped for end-of-life needs. We’re short-staffed, burned out, and stretched beyond reason. And when things inevitably go wrong, the blame rolls downhill to the floor staff — never to the administrators who created this mess.
This is not an isolated experience. This is long-term care in Virginia.
Understaffing and chronic call-outs aren’t the product of laziness; they’re the natural consequence of a workforce that’s been mentally, emotionally, and physically depleted. We are expected to chart perfectly, meet “customer satisfaction” metrics, and deliver individualized care to twenty or thirty residents at once — all while management prioritizes reimbursement rates over resident outcomes.
Virginia’s long-term care system has reached a breaking point. CNAs — the very people providing hands-on care to our most vulnerable citizens — are making poverty-level wages while administrators and corporate owners draw six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, residents suffer preventable injuries, infections, and indignities that no family should ever have to witness.
That’s why I drafted the Virginia Long-Term Care Staffing Standards Act of 2025 — a proposal that would finally establish enforceable minimum staffing ratios, hold facilities accountable for falsified documentation, and ensure that federal and state funds actually reach the bedside, not the boardroom.
Governor Glenn Youngkin and the General Assembly have a choice to make: either continue turning a blind eye to the suffering inside our nursing homes, or take decisive action before more lives are lost to this system’s neglect.
We don’t need another study, another task force, or another empty “thank you” during CNA Week. We need reform — real, measurable, enforceable reform — now.
Until Virginia chooses to value its caregivers, “quality care” will remain a slogan. But we will keep speaking up, because silence is complicity, and our residents deserve better.